GAPs: Procedures of irregularisation in Greece: spatial, carceral and temporal aspects. WP2 Working Paper

Τhis working paper explores how the irregularisation of migration is produced and reproduced through the workings of the legal and institutional framework of migration and asylum in the case of Greece. Irregularity is not considered here only as a legal status (or the absence of it), but as the outcome of policies, institutional arrangements, and the formal and informal practices of various actors within the wider political and socio-economic context. We thus discuss irregularisation as a process rather than a state of things, one in which many (also ‘regular’) people may be involved, in sequences of (ir)regular statuses. Irregularisation entails a sum of diverse informal or ‘irregular’ or ‘illegal’ practices that also people with ‘regular’ statuses develop in order to navigate in the otherwise hostile migration and asylum regime. 

The paper also analyses the spatial and temporal dimensions of the process of irregularisation, starting from even before border-crossing and extending during the diverse routes along which legislation and institutional practices create borders and categorise people. Moreover, the crucial role that is reserved for migrants’ deprivation of liberty (even for those applying –or having already applied– for asylum) calls for a separate examination of the carceral dimension that affects dramatically migrants’ pathways in space and time in the contemporary migration regimes.

The spatial and temporal boundaries among the figures of the (il)legal, the (ir)regular, the registered, the detained, the returnee, the deportee, and the asylum-seeker are blurred, as are the experiences and the statuses of those emplaced in these spaces and temporalities. Overall, as the paper argues, irregularisation is both produced by laws and their implementation but is also productive in itself in spatial, temporal and carceral terms. As some recent developments in the EU system of migration governance show, Greece can be considered as a showcase and a field of experimentation for irregularisation in Europe.